The Discovery Exhibition is a conference venue in which we share stories about the impact that visualization research has had on the end-user community. In order to help us distribute more broadly how visualization impacts people’s work or lives, leads to decisions being made, or actions being taken. VisWeek has been hosting the Discovery Exhibition since 2009. In contrast to a common academic contribution at a conference, however, the goal of an entry to the Discovery Exhibition is not to describe a visualization or vis tool per se, but to share which impact it had on the people using it.

Sharing these stories with the community will help us all improve our understanding about the role of visualization in work, research, entertainment, and many other areas, after it has moved out of the research realm. To encourage publishing reports about the application of visualization systems to real world problems, we specifically allow submissions that report the impact of “previously published work” on its user community.

Accepted authors will benefit from the following opportunities to present their work: A 2~4 page summary will be published and permanently archived on our website: http://www.discoveryexhibition.org. Their work will be displayed as a poster throughout the conference. A short oral presentation of their work at a plenary fast-forward session.

The content of a discovery submission is not about a visualization tool itself. Instead it has to focus on the impact that the use of the tool or the visualization has had on a specific user group. Successful submissions have to focus on the insights, discoveries, or general stories of visualization use in any domain or data. The description should show a real user community. For example, an entry could talk about insights made by a group of environmental scientists trying to find a cause of global warming using a specific visualization tool, and about the discovery process (i.e., how they made the discovery). The entry should provide information on the impact that insights (or findings) have had.

It is OK to use existing tools. Indeed, we strongly encourage students to even study the impact of tools built by others such as ManyEyes, Tableau, or Excel! If necessary, the datasets can be anonymized, but no synthetic data is allowed. Submissions could, for example, include information on:
What discoveries have users made? What have they learned about their data that they did not know before? What insights have they gained? What impact did the findings, insights, or discoveries have on their community? What surprising uses of visualization tools were seen? Were tools re-appropriated to answer very different questions than they were designed for? What was necessary to integrate a system or tool into everyday work practices? What were the obstacles to introducing new visualization technologies (if any)?

IMPORTANT DATES
Submission deadline: July 15th, 2011
Notification date: August 19th, 2011
Final Submission of Revised Summaries: September 2, 2011
Submission of Fast Forward Materials and Poster: September 30, 2011

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS:
Please submit your entry to the following address: discovery_exhibitionvisweekorg
If you plan to submit videos, please upload them to a web server and send us a link to download the file. For more information, please refer to http://www.discoveryexhibition.org.